I remembered the Gluster demo at Jaring over a video call, because I was the lead consultant pitching the scale-out NAS solution. It did not go well, and there were “bugs” which made the Head of IT flinched in her seat. Despite Jaring being Malaysia’s technology trailblazer, the impression of Gluster was forgettable. I stayed on the GlusterFS architecture a little while and then it dropped off my radar.

Gluster Scale Out NAS

But after the conversation last week, I am elated to revive my interest in Gluster, knowing that something big and impressive in coming into the fore very soon. Studying the architecture (again!), there are 2 parts of Gluster which excite me. One is the Brick and the other is the lack of a Metadata service.

I was talking to an end user who was slowly getting exposed to the cloud amid this Covid-19 pandemic. The whole work from home thingy was not new to him, but the scale of the practice suddenly escalated when more than 80 of his staff have to work from wherever they were stuck at during the past 6 weeks. Initially all of his staff had to alternate their folders and files access because their Sonicwall® Global Client license and SSL VPN Clients were inadequate. Even after their upgrade of the licenses, the performance of getting the folders and files through the Z: drive was poor and the network was chocked up. I told them that regardless, the SMB protocol of the NAS shared folders was chatty and generated a lot of network traffic on the VPN, along with the inadequacies of running this over the wide area Internet network. Staff productivity obviously nosedived.

Now here is a story of 2 Drives

The end user is not an IT savvy user. They were unfamiliar with Cloud Storage other than the free personal ones like Google Drive, or Dropbox. They have more than 200TB and I have introduced to them Wasabi® Cloud. They were very familiar with their Z:, their NAS Drive. I introduced to them the Cloud Drive.

NAS: Hey, how’s it going?

Cloud: Not bad. My boss and your boss are talking about bringing me and Wasabi® Cloud to join your gang. Hope you are OK with that.

The COVID-19 situation has driven technology to find new ways to adapt to the new digital workspace. Difficulty in remote access to content files and media assets has disrupted the workflow of the practitioners of many business segments. Many are trying to find ways to get the files and folders into their home computers and laptops to do work when they were used to getting them from the regular NAS shared drives.

These challenges have put hybridcloud file sharing into the forefront, making it the best possible option to access the NAS folders and files inside and outside the boundaries of the company’s network. However, end users are pressured to invest into new technologies to adjust to this new normal. It does not have to be this way, because FreeNAS™ (and in that aspect TrueNAS®) has plenty of cloud help to offer. Most of the features are Free!

TrueNAS Core replacing FreeNAS in version 12.0

[ Note: FreeNAS™ will become TrueNAS® Core in the release 12. News was announced 2 months ago ]

FreeNAS™ Cloud Sync

One of the underrated features of FreeNAS™ is Cloud Sync. It was released in version 11.1 and it is invaluable extending the hybrid cloud file sharing to the masses. Cloud Sync makes the shares available to public cloud services such as AWS S3, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Microsoft Blob Storage, Microsoft OneDrive, pCloud, Wasabi™ Cloud and more. This means that the files and folders used within the NAS space in the LAN, can synchronized and used through the public cloud services mentioned.

Have you looked under the hood?

The sad part is not many people look under the hood anymore, especially for the market the btrfs storage vendors are targeting. The small medium businesses just want a storage which is cheap. But cheap comes at a risk where the storage reliability and data integrity are often overlooked.

The technical conversation is secondary and thus the lack of queries for strong enterprise features may be leading btrfs to be complacent in its development.

[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]

And the Emmy® goes to …

Yes, the Emmy® goes to Dell EMC Isilon! It was indeed a well deserved accolade and an honour!

A lasting true clustered NAS

This is not a blog to praise Isilon but one that instill respect to a real true clustered, scale-out file system. I have known of OneFS for a long time, but never really took the opportunity to really put my hands on it since 2006 (there is a story). So here is a look at history …

Back in early to mid-2000, there was a lot of talks about large scale NAS. There were several players in the nascent scaling NAS market. NetApp was the filer king, with several competitors such as Polyserve, Ibrix, Spinnaker, Panasas and the young upstart Isilon. There were also Procom, BlueArc and NetApp’s predecessor Auspex. By the second half of the 2000 decade, the market consolidated and most of these NAS players were acquired.

[Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I, for one perhaps have seen far too many “file lifecycle and data management” software solutions that involved tiering, hierarchical storage management, ILM or whatever you call them these days. If I do a count, I would have managed or implemented at least 5 to 6 products, including a home grown one.

The whole thing is a very crowded market and I have seen many which have come and gone, and so when the opportunity to have a session with Komprise came at Storage Field Day 19, I did not carry a lot of enthusiasm.

Digital Transformation is again a big word for 2020. As more and more organizations becoming digitalized, the opportunity to communicate, interact and collaborate has become easier, faster, more convenient than ever.

File Sharing forever

Working in projects, file sharing is a fundamental activity that underpins communication and collaboration. Network drives via NAS (network attached storage) for file sharing are common within the confines of the company network. The perimeter of the company’s network is further extended via VPN (virtual private network) access, allowing branch offices and remote individuals to access the files from the central NAS server. It is a workable solution albeit poor network performance in delivery, challenges of siloed data management and difficult scalability.

The phenomenon of Dropbox

When Dropbox arrived circa 2008-2009, it took the industry by storm. They practically invented the term BYOD (bring your own device) and capture the imagination of the file sharing market. Gartner recognized this and coined EFSS (enterprise file sync and share) to consolidate the burgeoning file sharing market. Pretenders and challengers flooded the market, and after the shakedown, Box.net, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and of course, Dropbox, are some of the market leaders today.

It is from one of my FreeNAS customers daily security run logs, emailed to our support@katanalogic.com alias. It is attempting a brute force attack trying to crack the authentication barrier via the exposed SSH port.

Just days after the installation was completed months ago, a bot has been doing IP port scans on our system, and found the SSH port open. (We used it for remote support). It has been trying every since, and we have been observing the source IP addresses.

The new Ransomware attack vector

This is not surprising to me. Ransomware has become more sophisticated and more damaging than ever because the monetary returns from the ransomware are far more effective and lucrative than other cybersecurity threats so far. And the easiest preys are the weakest link in the People, Process and Technology chain. Phishing breaches through social engineering, emails are the most common attack vectors, but there are vhishing (via voicemail) and smshing (via SMS) out there too. Of course, we do not discount other attack vectors such as mal-advertising sites, or exploits and so on. Anything to deliver the ransomware payload.

noun: An IT project outside the organization IT department’s domain and often unapproved. A dark area.

verb: A defiant user-level practice to perform IT activities where the organization’s IT department has little or no control.

Shadow IT or Stealth IT

There was a BYOD (bring your own device) craze about a decade ago. The darling of the BYOD craze, Dropbox was on every vendor’s lips and many look-a-likes sprouted like mushrooms. Microsoft OneDrive (previously known as SkyDrive), Google Drive, and of course, Dropbox and many others are still serving a growing customer base, together with many others. But most of them have taken a different, more mature form, a market where Gartner has defined as Enterprise File Sync and Share several years ago. And today, that market is shifting again, and soon to be known as Content Collaboration Platform.

But Shadow IT remains where many users are facing challenges with their IT department. Rigid, archaic, and difficult have forced end users to take matters into their own hands to share files, away from the controls and structures. And those free GBs from those cloud storage providers looked so tempting …

The picture above is someone unlocking a safe. I have literally seen an IT department keeping their files on disks and then keep them in a safe! When they want to share it, they have to run the safe combinations to bring out the disks, and they did it in front of me. It was funny then but the paranoia is real! Some IT departments are really that pain-in-the-a$$.

A business risk

Shadow IT is a risk. Security is often the touted risk, but the issue goes beyond just security. Often, the compromised issue represents a degradation of the company’s brand, image and customer confidence, and could lead to negative reverberation of the company’s business.

Time to regain control and secure file access

EasiShare, a private military-grade, enterprise file sync and share platform is a solution I am exploring. It is similar to the Dropbox concept many are familiar with, but without the security concerns and heavy applications of Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive.

Many organizations in Malaysia have expressed concerns about data privacy and security. And this is a great opportunity for Malaysian companies to consider data privacy and security seriously, especially with Shadow IT looming to comprise the control of the IT departments.

[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Tech Field Day for Storage Field Day 18 from Feb 27-Mar 1, 2019 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I was first introduced to WekaIO back in Storage Field Day 15. I did not blog about them back then, but I have followed their progress quite attentively throughout 2018. 2 Storage Field Days and a year later, they were back for Storage Field Day 18 with a new CTO, Andy Watson, and several performance benchmark records.

The Virtual Institute for I/O IO-500 10-node performance challenge was particularly interesting, because it pitted WekaIO against Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) Summit supercomputer, and WekaIO won. Details of the challenge were listed in Blocks and Files and WekaIO Matrix Filesystem became the fastest parallel file system in the world to date.

Control, control and control

I studied WekaIO’s architecture prior to this Field Day. And I spent quite a bit of time digesting and understanding their data paths, I/O paths and control paths, in particular, the diagram below:

Starting from the top right corner of the diagram, applications on the Linux client (running Weka Client software) and it presents to the Linux client as a POSIX-compliant file system. Through the network, the Linux client interacts with the WekaIOkernel-based VFS (virtual file system)driver which coordinates the Front End (grey box in upper right corner) to the Linux client. Other client-based protocols such as NFS, SMB, S3 and HDFS are also supported. The Front End then interacts with the NIC (which can be 10/100G Ethernet, Infiniband, and NVMeoF) through SR-IOV (single root IO virtualization), bypassing the Linux kernel for maximum throughput. This is with WekaIO’s own networking stack in user space. Continue reading →